In the last few decades of nineteenth century Victorian England, the moral disposition that Queen Victoria had ushered in with her rule began to be challenged. Individuals questioned the authenticity of morality in both public and private life. It is not a mistake that two literary works close in time, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) both present characters who fail miserably to control the evil inherit in their own hearts.

Stevenson’s work presents a man named Dr. Jekyll who concocts a potion that transforms him into a hideous being: Mr. Hyde. Up to this point, the local officials, including the narrator, Mr. Utterson, have searched for Edward Hyde, wanting to prosecute him for crimes he’s committed in London (the beating of a little girl and murder of an old man). One night, they…

I just “defend” myself as a way to justify my own actions to myself. I’m basically trying to convince myself of what I’m saying. (This is largely due to being raised that you can’t trust yourself, because you are a sinner…)

No doubt, it is because I love freedom, and love expressing my freedom away from the chains of moralisticconservatism…

I don’t think that I’m enjoying the suffering of those who are slaves, but rather, I’m mocking their attempts to enslave me. They can’t do it, and it is impossible. And that overwhelms me with joy, so I, like an immature jester, revel in my freedom, and laugh at and mock conservatism, for no matter how close it may come to me, I know that it will never CONSUME and ENSNARE me, so its attempts to do such can only produce laughter from me, as I know how futile its attempts to do such are…

And, no doubt, there’s a little bit of laughing to fight back the tears as well, in there…

Many times, the fatalistic nature of certain evils and injustices produce an unspeakable depression in me, and in other times, I mock them and make jokes of them.

I can’t IGNORE them, for it is not in me to do so. I know that, deep down in my heart, there are horrible, widely unspeakable things on this earth.

And that’s why I speak about them.

The horror is often difficult to bear on my heart. And if I look at it through a serious lens, its torture is strong enough to make me want to give in. But laughing at it is one thing that gives me the strength to face it. For my constitution is only strong enough to take it seriously for so long: eventually, a joke must be made of it, and that is my way of taking it seriously: of acknowledging the problem.

But I only have a constitution which can attempt to solve the problem for so long, before it starts to consume me, and starts to draw me into that infinite depression…

And then, my only choices are to, scarily, givein to that depression, or to find something to laugh at to cheer me up.

And I think that my natural comedy comes from my nature to see the horribleness as deeply as I can, and look it straight in the eye, and fight it as long as I can, until I begin to lose, and then, I must back away slowly, laughing to fight back the tears of what I have just faced, and what I have just seen…

There are many people, lost within the unspeakable horror, who, all the more horrifically, attempt to put a smile on their face among the pain, but who pervertedly saythat the pain is their happiness.

There have been many, for example, comedians who were raised Catholic who lashed out against their evil raisings, and whose personalities became shaped to be very “offensive“, “satirical”, and “abrasive”.

No doubt, my attempts to be moralistically optimistic, and the absolutely atrocious, horrible, monstrous depression that followed the certain failure of that attitude, have shaped my personality to be extra cynical, and pessimistic, which have, no doubt, also shaped my personality to be comedic, in order to deal with it all. And, no doubt, it has also shaped my type of comedy to be dark, and horrific, for that’s what false optimism and strict religiosityare: dark, horrific evils…

May God have mercy on those who live their lives strictly by the book, and who cry and weep at night; feel the pain in their hearts, and give lip service to the many gifts that they have received from God; and who consider it their moral duty to recruit others into that militaristicHELL…

(I know that the radio and the toaster would be more appropriate, but I realized this after I found this scene, and I don’t know of any scenes in the first movie where the radio and toaster are alone together. Perhaps there is one, though…)